Island/Synopsis
; One-line spoiler: After failing to stop the development of weapons of mass destruction, a megalomaniac creates a religious cult and plots to destroy and re-build the world but is foiled by the children he had victimized and manipulated. ; The Bomb The atmospheric testing of the hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands, 1954.: A nuclear accident incinerates a civilian yacht, killing family members who had infiltrated a weapons testing area. Their intention had been to stage an armed protest designed to expose and halt the development of unimaginably horrific weapons of mass destruction. : Lawyer Jonathan Studeman investigates the accident for the U.S. president and learns that unidentified conspirators inside the testing program helped with the infiltration. : An adopted Amerasian child has survived, stranded with his Caucasian-American mother and Japanese sister at a campsite on uninhabited Yelbatin Island. The mother and sister have swallowed poison and died. Studeman recognizes the dead mother as the woman who gave him a letter addressed to the vice president a month earlier. He confronts the vice president and discovers that the letter was a warning about the planned protest, and a plea for help. : The lead conspirator, psychiatrist Dr. Isaac Levanthal, is a man said to be listed in Albany as the wealthy descendant of a nefarious New York railroad tycoon. He arranges for the surviving child to be secretly adopted by members of a religious cult in Indianapolis, Indiana, and he tells Studeman that the child has died and been interred with his mother and sister on the island where they were discovered. : But Levanthal is very nearly exposed by the discovery of a book he had inscribed and given as a gift to the youngest conspirator. The book is Falsifiers of History, a denial by Stalin of Soviet complicity in Hitler's rise to power. Fortunately for Levanthal, the book is taken by a fellow conspirator. ; Confrontation The enforcement of integration by Federal troops under the command of Maj Gen Edwin Walker in Little Rock, Arkansas, 1957.: The conspirators learn that one among them is a traitor, a child-abuser, and a fugitive war criminal who all along had been spying on them for a right-wing extremist Army general. The general commands Federal peacekeeping troops who are deployed to enforce a controversial ruling by the Supreme Court. : Intending to kill the child he had once abused, the fugitive war criminal firebombs the Indianapolis church that is headquarters of the religious cult, killing children and seriously injuring the adopted child. Tipped off by the extremist general who hates them but fears being implicated in the firebombing, the conspirators capture and kill the fugitive, and dispose of his body. ; Revolution The Cuban Revolution, 1959, following the coup that ousted Carlos Prío Socarrás, 1952.: The vice president is running for president. Studeman distrusts him and gives a copy of the warning letter to his opponent. : An obscure reference in the letter implicates the vice president in a disastrous CIA-directed coup overthrowing the elected leader of a foreign country. The coup has sparked a revolution bringing to power a dangerous enemy of the United States. The opponent makes clever use of the information and defeats the vice president in a close election. ; Crisis The Cuban Missile Crisis, October, 1962.: Studeman has a new hobby, raising hamsters in a cage. And, he has bought a necklace and a Goddess-of-Justice pendant as a gift for his long-time assistant, Angela, who was recently engaged to be married. As Studeman insists, Angela accepts the gift even though she has been forced to break off her engagement. The pendant is in an expensive lockable jewelry box, with an inscription that reads, in part, "opens not but from within." : Yelbatin Island, meanwhile, has become a secret nuclear shelter under a government war-survivability program administered by Issac Levanthal. When a military crisis erupts early in the new president's administration, vast quantities of gold bullion are secretly moved to and permanently stored at the shelter. ; Sedition Project MKUltra, the CIA's mind-control experiments in the 50s and early 60s; and the mental asylum detention of Edwin Walker on charges of sedition and inciting to violence, October 1962.: Issac Levanthal is conducting mind-control experiments for the CIA at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners. The facility he leads is referred to as the "Insanity Lab." The child rescued from the island and adopted into the Indianapolis cult is now Hideo Shin, grown to become the leader of his own survivalist cult under the influence of Levanthal. Hideo tells his followers that he is visited in dreams by the prophesying spirit of his natural mother, a Korean woman who left him in a orphanage. : As the FBI continues to investigate the firebombing, Studeman learns what became of the child he rescued from the island. He visits Hideo's church in Los Angeles and falls in love with Hideo's adoptive mother, Kimiko, who is now divorced. Hideo and Kimiko ask Studeman to help rescue Kimiko's young daughter Maya, who remains with her father in the clutches of the Indianapolis cult. ; Assassination The Kennedy Assassination, 22 November 1963, and the attempted assassination of Edwin Walker by Lee Harvey Oswald 7 months prior.: On a guided tour of Hideo Shin's "secret tunnel" in the mountains of Southern California, Studeman falls and is nearly killed, an apparent accident. His life is saved by a young black boy named Ronnie Ayers, whose parents are members of Hideo's survivalist cult. : The conspirators plan to use the cult to illicitly acquire great wealth and power, promising cult members that in this way they will survive a prophesied nuclear holocaust. To prevent exposure, they try to kill the right-wing general and the now-suspicious lawyer, Studeman. But the patsy they have chosen for the job assassinates the president instead. ; Project Project Azorian, 1971 to 1974, the CIA's recovery of the sunken Soviet submarine K-129 from the Pacific Ocean floor.: The former vice president is elected president. The conspirators and the religious cult led by Hideo Shin launch an assault on the island shelter, intending to seize the U.S. reserves of gold bullion and flee to a secret refuge. They claim to possess two nuclear torpedoes acquired from renegade Russian officers who hijacked and sank a submarine. They threaten devastation if stopped. : The president orders island defenders to implement an emergency evacuation procedure called the Last Extremity Defense, and he orders the CIA to undertake the recovery of the remains of a sunken Russian submarine to determine if nuclear torpedoes are missing. ; Shock The Nixon Shock, August 15, 1971: Withdrawal from the Gold Standard and the institution of price controls.: The island assault is foiled by Studeman with the help of a young defector from the cult. The defector is Ronnie, the boy who once saved Studeman's life. But the assault has triggered a defensive meltdown of the island's nuclear reactor. The U.S. reserves of gold bullion are melted and fused with coral rock, and Studeman himself is framed, arrested and imprisoned with the cult members, who accuse him of being the lead conspirator. : The president believes the loss of gold reserves and the possibility of missing nuclear weapons must remain secret. He shocks the nation by announcing new economic policies that effectively end the monetary use of gold, and he asks Isaac Levanthal, who is now Director of the Bureau of Prisons, to create a secret facility for isolating the imprisoned cult. ; Scandal The Watergate Scandal and the resignation of Richard Nixon, August 9, 1974.: The president now has even greater reason to fear the warning letter. If revealed it would provoke an investigation not only of his role, long ago, in the disastrous coup that led to a military crisis, but also of the accident that caused the death of the woman and her family, of the subsequent cover-up, and of the island, where the shelter was created, and the gold lost. He engages in illegal acts in an effort to recover all copies of the letter, the original of which he knows was retained by Studeman. : The CIA has succeeded in recovering the sunken Russian submarine, and has determined that two nuclear torpedoes are indeed missing. But a string of burglaries linked to the White House raise the ire of Congress. On the verge of being impeached, the president is forced to resign. ; Crash The derailment of Amtrak train No. 4-C near Melvern, Kansas, on July 5, 1974, and the crash of Trans World Airlines flight 514 at Mt. Weather, Virginia, on December 1, 1974.: Fearing that a new president will discover the truth, Levanthal and a female conspirator attempt to kill Studeman as he is being transferred by rail just prior to the president's resignation. They cause a derailment, but in the wreckage Studeman escapes. : With the help of Ronnie, Kimiko, and his former assistant and current defense lawyer, Angela, the fugitive Studeman maneuvers to expose Levanthal. Former members of the Indianapolis cult board a flight to Washington where they expect to meet with the new president. But the airplane crashes on Mt. Weather in Virginia, and Studeman and Kimiko are believed to have perished. : Days later, a clever ruse by Ronnie Ayers horrifies the conspirator who years earlier had hidden an incriminating book. Convinced that it was his own leader who deliberately caused the airplane to crash, the conspirator shoots and nearly kills Levanthal, and is arrested and imprisoned for attempted murder. ; Massacre The Jonestown Massacre, November 18, 1978.: Ronnie rescues Hideo Shin's sister Maya from the original Indianapolis cult just as all its members are dying in a mass murder-suicide. He sails with her and Angela toward the island where Studeman believed Hideo's first adoptive mother was secretly buried. En route, he explains to them that he has figured out what even Studeman and Hideo Shin never knew: the Caucasian woman who wrote the letter was actually Hideo Shin's natural mother; and the Korean woman who had prophesied to Hideo "in dreams" was just a light-and-mirrors illusion, created by Isaac Levanthal and enhanced by mind-numbing drugs. : Ronnie's hired crew and captain are all natives from the neighboring islands. As they approach Yelbatin ostensibly to recover the remains of Hideo's natural mother, the fearful captain tells a story. "Batin" is slang for a secret lover, and "El" is the name of an ancient cult. Legend says that a priest of El seduced a wife of a king. The king killed the priest and banished the wife and the cult to the desolate tribal graveyard that became known as Yelbatin, island of the Mistress of El. There they resorted to cannibalism, and their still-hungry spirits inhabit the island now. Whoever goes there will be consumed by them. ; Incursion The Soviet deployment of forces to Afghanistan to resist Muslim extremists, 1979.: On the island, Ronnie, Maya and Angela are surrounded and taken prisoner by ghostly figures. The captain and crew escape aboard Ronnie's yacht, apparently terrified by the legend-come-to-life. : Brought underground by a mob of men and women wearing robes and pointed hoods, the three trespassers discover what Studeman and Ronnie had suspected all along. The island shelter has been transformed into a secret Federal prison lorded over by Levanthal and housing Hideo Shin and all the members of his cult. Angela, injured and disoriented, is cared for by the conspirator who was imprisoned for the attempted murder of Levanthal. He and all the cult members believe that the civilization-ending holocaust has already happened, and that they have survived in the underground island shelter. : And in fact, Russia is preparing to invade a country in Southwest Asia, and when that happens Levanthal intends to transform the cult's illusion into reality. He reveals to Ronnie that he will soon use the weapons he controls to ignite an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States. ; Vela The Vela Incident, September 22, 1979: An unidentified "double flash" of light detected by an American Vela Hotel satellite near the Prince Edward Islands off Antarctica, which was believed to have been a nuclear explosion of unknown origin.: Meanwhile, however, Studeman and Kimiko, who were never on board the plane that crashed, have already met with the U.S. president and convinced him of the truth. A U.S. Navy warship is fast approaching the island, accompanied by an invasion force of natives in small boats, led by Ronnie's captain. : Trapped within the shelter-prison, Levanthal uses a personal code, "listed in Albany," to remotely detonate one of the nuclear devices hidden far away. This demonstration of his power is detected by a U.S. reconnaissance satellite. He uses another code, "denial by Stalin," to set a timer that will explode the remaining nuclear torpedo when the warships arrive, obliterating them and anyone who remains on the island. : Before Levanthal can make his escape, Ronnie and Maya reveal to Hideo how he had been deceived and manipulated by Levanthal his entire life. Wielding a knife, Hideo attacks and kills Levanthal, who was the only person who knew the code needed to stop the denotation. : But Ronnie has observed that each code was an anagram of Yelbatin Island; each a short phrase meaningful to Levanthal and composed of those same 14 letters rearranged. Based on his and Angela's knowledge of Levanthal's past, he is able to guess the needed code and prevent denotation in the nick of time. ; Christmas The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Christmas Day, 1979.: Ronnie and Maya have fallen in love. Studeman, vindicated and freed, marries Kimiko. : Angela is reunited with her former fiancee. At her engagement party on Christmas Day, Studeman reveals that he had given the original copy of the warning letter to Angela, who never knew she had it. It was, and still is, hidden in a false bottom in the jewelry box. Placing a hamster inside and then closing and locking the box, Studeman demonstrates how the false bottom opens when the hamster claws at an exposed tripwire. : Television news reports the Russian invasion of a neighboring country. To some celebrants the news is alarming. But asked, "What do we do now?," Studeman casually tosses the letter into the fireplace. "We get on with our lives." References